5.19.2006

Marketing in Music : Part Deux

Over lunch I managed to take a look through the notes I took last night during the seminar at Nettwerk's office.Not to take anything away from Jordan's stellar recap of the event, but there were a few other points that I just came across which I felt worthy of another go 'round. Hence, this post.As Jordan alluded to much of the conversation centred around the marketing of music from the artist's standpoint, and not the everyday marketer. That said, there were a few nuggets of goodness that I feel still apply to us in our everyday marketing duties. Let me know if you agree:Carter Marshall handles the online / digital marketing for Nettwerk. He was posed a question by an audience member about how artists can use the internet as a tool for marketing their music. One of his responses was to the effect of this: "you have to become close friends with your fan base, and allow them to do the work for you. In essence, you want to create a fan for life."Something inside me tells me that's something any company could use in their own activities. It's all about building evangelists, and developing that sense of pride so that your fans (read: customers) will feel proud to tell others.Another panel member, Rich Adams, handles the PR initiatives for Nettwerk, and has moved up the ranks as a veritable expert in what he does for the company. He realizes the importance of a sense of community too: "If your buddy tells you it's a rad band, you'll check it out. You may not trust the article in The Rolling Stone, but you'll trust your buddy." How awesome is that statement!?And let's not forget Erin Kinghorn - Nettwerk's expert on sales & marketing. Through it all, she kept coming back to the same point: make it emotional, and really connect with your customer. Regardless of what your business is - I think there are some valuable gems to take away from this. Have a great weekend.RyanPS: I'm working on getting the audio / video from the seminar posted here, so stay tuned next week for your chance to live it all again.

Carter Marshall could not be more right. Especially with the current trend in the music industry of being adversarial to fans. Anybody who wants to see the fruits of the adversarial tree need only look to Metallica. Metallica led the forefront of the Napster assault, and when the fans were hurt their response was "We're Metallica. We don't need you as fans." Funnily enough, since then every single one of their album has failed to be successful, the Used CD stores have been overflowing with people selling back their albums, and they've even had members of the band leave.

Still remember that fateful day when I tried to log onto Napster and was told 'You have been banned by Metallica' lol Funny thing is, I heard a few weeks prior that Metallica was causing a stink, and I had downloaded about 3 Metallica songs, so I deleted them all off my computer. Then a couple of weeks later, I found out I was 'banned'. There was a disclaimer that said that if you were banned, it was because Metallica had found that you were 'sharing' their songs on a certain date, like a week beforehand. The funny thing was, I had already deleted ALL the Metallica songs by that point, so their lawyers were obviously lying about that.

Ah well, it's no coinky-dink that their career has been in the trashcan since then.